Social Psychology

The Power of the Situation

Sam Sommers (2008) writes in an article entitled The Elusive Power of Daily Situations about an incident in which he broke a finger of each one of his hands and had to undergo a minor surgical operation that was necessary to ensure the healing process. He describes how this situation was altered for him by his anxiety over the various choices and complications that were part of this type of surgery, by the discomfort he felt wearing a flimsy hospital gown that he was unable to tie due to his broken fingers and being in an unfamiliar place, and by his embarrassment at the incident that resulted in the injury in the first place. Sommers relates this to the phenomena of the power of the daily situation as he writes "As we know from decades of research in social psychology, many of us...
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